Scottish Education: It's time to drop the timed essay

Marking is always an issue in English because you tend to have kids returning their folios around the same time that prelims are due, and the English exam is a three-parter. 

There’s the big close reading paper, the textual analysis and the timed essay, and I don’t believe in the timed essay.

Even with the best intentions, the timed essay becomes a memorisation task. And even with Higher English, a capable young person just needs to look at the patterns. If they’re studying a novel at Higher, they can see that every year the three types of question that come up are character, theme and scene, or something along those lines. 

Once they’ve got the general key points of the text for each of those types, it’s just a case of moulding their answer to whatever question comes up, and the questions don’t vary enough for it to be a really appropriate challenge. 

I’m not an exam fan anyway, but if we must have exams I don’t see the benefit of a timed essay. I would much rather it be an untimed piece. You can still do that and get around all the anxieties around AI. 

It can be done exclusively in the classroom over a longer period of time. There are a lot of ways in which it can be done. 

I just don’t see why 70% of a young person’s attainment should be determined by a stressful 90 minutes. 

I currently have in my rucksack 45 of these timed essays, 30 close reading papers and 30 textual analysis papers, and that would be fine if there was time given to do it. I accidentally on purpose left all my exams at school over the Christmas holidays, because I don’t get paid to mark in those times. 

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To be fair to the school that I work in, my boss said there is zero expectation to mark over the holidays. Other teachers aren’t so fortunate. There are other schools, including some I’ve been in before, where there is very much an expectation that you would do the unpaid overtime out of the goodness of your own heart. 

We need to mark and then moderate it to ensure consistency, objectivity and the robust integrity of the assessment. It just becomes a very stressful and retina-burning affair. 

I’ve got the exam papers with me in my rucksack but they’re probably going to stay there and I don’t know why I bring them home. I’m fried after teaching all day. 

I’m pretty much at maximum with my timetable allotment right now, in terms of teaching to non-contact time. It’s an impossible task. And I’m writing report cards. 

I hate when teachers copy and paste, fill-in-the-blanks report cards, and that was getting done when I was at school. Something’s going to have to give. 

I actually love marking. It’s so gratifying to see the progress of a student, and even when you’re marking the work of a student that you don’t teach, you can learn a lot because you can infer little differences in someone else’s teaching style, or a different interpretation of a text, which is really good to see. 

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The problem isn’t the act itself, it’s the allocation of time, and that’s where there needs to be more flexibility, particularly for the humanities. History, Modern Studies and Geography all have the same problem, because a lot of their work is completely essay-driven, and a lot more time needs to be given to that.